


Where You Live

by smolhombre



Series: Bevy [3]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Breaking Up & Making Up, Could Probably Be Read as a Stand Alone if you CBF, Established Relationship, Explicit Sexual Content, F/M, Flawed Characters Trying Their Best, Introspection, Lots of Talk About Love, Power Dynamics, Relationship Negotiation, Self-Indulgent, Unhealthy Relationships, Unreliable Narrator, soft
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-01
Updated: 2018-12-01
Packaged: 2019-09-05 07:12:08
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 11,765
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16805923
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smolhombre/pseuds/smolhombre
Summary: “Maybe I wasn’t being clear, before, but when I asked you to 'teach me,'” Darcy drops her register into a caricature of something questionably sexy, wiggling her eyebrows for good measure, “I really only meant it as foreplay."Things are fucked up, yes, but Darcy has always been a fixer.





	Where You Live

Darcy started it as a joke, really.

Really, it was a _joke_.

Huffing, she looks down at the pen in her hand and weighs the merits of jamming it into her eyeball and through her skull, ending her suffering for good.

This was _supposed to be a_ _joke_.

“It’s been five minutes,” Bruce offers mildly from his seat across from her. He doesn’t look up from his laptop, but he has more of a smile on his face than is really called for to just be reading over Tony’s latest schematics. Her stomach does a little flip. _Asshole._

“And I’ll never get them back,” Darcy mumbles, sullen. “Come on, Bruce, do I really —”

“Yes.” He has the gall to shrug a little as he says it.

Darcy looks back at her notes on the paper in front of her. She won’t change Bruce’s mind — doesn’t want to, _really_ — but also won’t miss an opportunity to whine. It’s part of the game. “Maybe I wasn’t being clear, before, but when I asked you to _teach me_ ,” she drops her register into a caricature of something questionably sexy, wiggling her eyebrows for good measure, “I really only meant it as foreplay. I really, honestly, _truly_ —”

Bruce takes a bite into the apple Darcy had left on his desk that morning, the bright _crunch_ cutting her off neatly. In Bruce’s empty apartment, it’s nearly loud enough to echo.

“Okay, yes. The apple was a bit over the top,” Darcy concedes, “I see where you may have been confused —”

Another bite. He chews with his mouth open this time, smacking loud enough Darcy can’t speak until he swallows.

“Now that’s just gross. But, what I mean is, the apple was _also_ just because you skip breakfast unless I force feed you, so don’t read _too_ much into it, and anyway I —”

“Four apples.”

“What?”

“Not ‘the apple.’ You have left me, in fact, four apples this week,” Bruce clarifies, taking another bite. He thankfully chews like a civilized human being this time, not speaking again until he’s swallowed. “Which lead me to realize how serious you were about learning. I’m sorry I didn’t notice before.”

Bruce looks genuinely repentant for three entire, miserable seconds before he looks back to his computer screen, carefully neutral again. “Is it too hard, Darcy? Is that what it is?”

Despite herself, Darcy squirms a bit in her chair. “You know it is.”

He looks up at her, blinking owlishly. “Do I?”

Any pleasant warmth curling in her belly dissipates, fast as a blink. “Let me guess, these are notes you made in, what? Fourth grade?”

“I don’t still own anything of mine from before the Other Guy,” Bruce shrugs, but there’s an edge to it. “So no. Still, it’s only undergrad level vectors. You want a box of crayons and some construction paper instead?”

“Goddammit, Bruce,” she growls. “You want to fucking teach me? Then _teach me_ . Don’t just sit me down with —” half the papers go flying across the floor as she waves them around wildly — “this _shit_ and make me feel like a _moron_.”

Darcy fights to not cross her arms over her chest and pout a little more while Bruce just looks at her blankly. Whining is part of the game, but too much petulance will ruin Bruce’s mood for real and take her out of the headspace she needs to be in to allow him his weirdness. She settles for aggressively clicking her pen and glowering until Bruce speaks again, soft and even.

“Pick those up.”

The thing is this: Darcy sometimes, even still, catches herself questioning if she really likes this shit. She loves Bruce, but the parameters of it — how far that really takes them, what it makes up for, how much leeway it gives him to be strange and weird and _Bruce_ — are murky and wobble without much solid beneath them. Some days, it’s enough. Others, Darcy is left scratching her head and failing to puzzle out what, exactly, they are doing. Worse are the days when she’s stuck wondering what they _are_.

Probably, objectively, they are at least friends. Even Bruce would agree to that, maybe. But she wouldn’t call herself Bruce’s _girlfriend_ with a gun to her head, and even the _word_ “boyfriend” seems too young and small to describe Bruce in any way, with any body. Once in a blue moon, they break from Bruce’s weird pseudokinks and try what Darcy has come to call “sex... _ish_ ,” but the orgasms that come out of it — on her part, only, of course — are almost not worth it for having to try and categorize the expression on Bruce’s face afterwards. It’s not sad, or angry, but it’s —

Bruce tosses the apple core at her. It gets stuck in her shirt, falling down the little valley between her breasts.

“Hello space cadet, it’s me, Bruce.” He ignores Darcy’s undignified squawking as she digs the offending core out of her bra. “You bothered me all week about playing teacher, but you may not remember. I know using your brain can be hard for you. I just told you to pick those papers up. If you make a mess of my house I will make you leave.”

“If I threw this back at you,” Darcy manages after a few deep breaths, holding the apple core aloft, “would you turn green? What’s the probability I do it and live?”

“Five percent if you really chuck it at me, thirty-two if you only half-ass it. Don’t make me ask you again, Darce. Pick them up.”

Darcy swallows. This could very well be leading to nothing. A lot of times, with Bruce, it doesn’t. But after a week of bugging him with shiny apples on his desk and, on Wednesday, an entirely unprofessional length skirt, it could also be leading to _something._ Darcy might even _like_ it.

She slides off her chair and collects the papers. “To be fair, you didn’t ask me in the first place. _Telling_ isn’t really _asking_ —”

Bruce hooks two fingers in the belt loop of her jeans as she bends to pick up a sheet near his chair. Darcy falls silent before he even gives it a good tug.

It’s kind of pathetic. Bruce agrees.

“That’s it?” He twists the loop a little, humming. “You’re usually so noisy. Maybe I’m reading this wrong.”

Darcy leans back, resting on her heels. She’s waist level with Bruce like this, and it takes a lot of self control to not nose dive into his lap and see what attention she can get out of him before he boots her out his front door.

“It’s really hard to think about things that aren’t touching you right now. How nice would I have to ask to sit in your lap? I want to shrink the Darcy-to-Bruce’s-Dick orbit.”

“That was almost funny.”

“Almost?” She doesn’t look away from the line of Bruce’s thigh, imagining the slight give it would have under her weight. “I’m comedy gold. Take that back.”

Bruce releases the belt loop with a little sigh. Darcy tries to not deflate.  
“It’s mostly dumb. Get back in your chair.”

The papers in Darcy’s hands crumple under her fist.

“No.”

Above her, Bruce goes very still. His hand is very gentle on the crown of her hair. It makes her more nervous than if he’d yanked at it. When he speaks, his murmur is very soft.

“Reconsider.”

Darcy steels herself, impatient and stubborn and ready for something to _happen_ already. “No.”

She leans forward to press her forehead to Bruce’s calf, but he rises to his feet. She _whacks_ her temple on the corner of the chair instead.

“Mother _fucker_!”

“You should go.”

Darcy stands up so quickly her head spins from more than just the impact of the chair. “What?”

Bruce closes his laptop without looking at her. “If you can’t listen, you should leave.” He walks towards the door, unlocking it on the keypad. Darcy’s not worked out if he’s sincere or not by the time he turns to look at her expectantly.

“Time out. Cut the — no more weird shit, for a minute. What are we doing?”

“You are trying to kill yourself, and I am about to eat dinner and finish editing the journal article Jane sent me earlier.”

Darcy sputters. “ _Killing myself?_ Don’t be a drama queen, Bruce.”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Darcy’s learned the difference between playacting Bruce and the Bruce that looks at her now, genuinely angry and stubborn enough to wait out the sun’s eventual implosion. His jaw is clenched, a muscle there fluttering visibly. Never a good sign.

She tries to fix it. “Telling you no is hardly a capital punishment.”

The air around them promptly drops a few degrees. Darcy winces.

“You think that’s the issue here?” Bruce asks quietly. He is making an effort to look at the floor and not at her face, his breathing very even and shallow. Very, very bad sign.

Darcy gulps. They were perhaps past “upset,” “frustrated,” and “furious,” moved on to something green on the edges and more than a single-word descriptor.

“Very dumb,” Bruce continues. He holds his breath for a count of three before speaking again. “Very dumb of you, to get involved with someone who you think would kill you for saying no.”

Her ears ring. “I don’t — Bruce, what are you even fucking _talking_ about? I hate when you do this shit. I was only saying I _trust you_ ; you’re turning it around on me when you know that’s not what I goddamn mean. I’m trying to tell you I want to _stay_ —”

Bruce is fast, is the thing, when he can be assed to be. The serum _worked_ , and even if he likes to avoid things that remind him of that fact, sometimes neither of them can escape it. Before Darcy can finish, Bruce has his forearm pressed against Darcy’s throat, crowding her up against the wall.

“That would be a very dumb decision, on your part.”

Darcy has one arm half-raised to block him when she catches herself. If she lets herself be scared, she’d be giving him what he wants at the least, and maybe prodding at the Other Guy at worst. She juts her chin out instead.

“You’re trying to scare me now?” She wheezes out. “You wouldn’t hurt me. Get off my windpipe before I’m the fucking angry one.”

The pressure is unchanged for so long that a little, unwelcome thread of fear starts to curl up from her belly. But Bruce does move, and then there’s a foot and some of space between them, fast as a blink.

“This is a dumb mistake on both of our parts. Both of us.”

Darcy’s breath catches once, twice, three times before she manages a full inhale. “I cannot believe,” she hisses, fisting her hands in his shirt and tugging him closer, “that you are going to try and pull this self sacrificing, tragic hero, patronizing _bullshit_ with me right now! I know what I’m doing, and I know what I want. Don’t treat me like an idiot and don’t talk to me like I’m a _mistake_ you made!”

Bruce steps back. He looks at her like a problem to solve, and there is no warmth or fondness in it at all. “Lock the door on your way out.”

“I am not leaving until you fucking talk to me! You can’t just brush me off like I’m —”

The pain when Bruce grips the tops of her arms is a new one between them. Bruce sometimes touches her in ways that are weird, but rarely does he touch her in ways that hurt, and even more rarely in ways she doesn’t want. Still, maybe his fingers biting into her biceps shouldn’t feel as foreign as it does.

She jerks away from him reflexively, and even though getting his hands off of her is a relief, it’s almost not worth it for having to watch his face crumple up after. She flips through the mental rolodex where she catalogs everything from “Changes in Bruce’s Minor Speech Inflections: A Dictionary” to “the ruffle of Bruce’s hair when he’s just woken up vs. when he runs his hands through it because he’s agitated,” trying to place the expression. She settles on him looking a bit disgusted.

“Oh, are you too good to touch me at all now?” She snaps.

His eyes are bloodshot when he looks back up at her, his whole body trembling. Darcy refuses to run, at this point, on principle. If she dies, she’ll die being _right_.

The expression on his face is new and cruel, foreign like it doesn’t belong to him at all. “Are you really this _stupid_?”

There’s a cracking _snap_ somewhere that could be the aneurysm in her brain or the sound of her palm meeting Bruce’s cheek, followed by a bleak, heavy silence.

Her hand stings red and hot, a puffy outline of it’s impact blooming on Bruce’s face while she watches, hardly able to believe herself. She’s had to fight off unwelcome hands and leers before, even had to fight for her life and felt guiltless about it, but she’s never even dreamed of hitting a lover. Never of just lashing out because of her temper. _You asshole,_ she seethes, unsure which of them she’s referring to.

“I— I’m sorry,” Darcy pants out finally. The hairs on the back of her neck are on end. Something wordless and urgent in her hindbrain is telling her to run, is starting to tingle in her knees and the balls of her feet. _Run_ , it says, _go. Leave._ But Darcy won’t. Maybe Darcy can’t.

Bruce is hardly breathing. No small part of her is in full _fight or flight_ , but since the rest of her brain function is still focused on how fucking _furious_ she still is, there’s no reasoning herself down from that adrenaline. Belatedly, she realizes she’s shaking as much as Bruce is. Her words only come out between heavy pants that don’t help her get any oxygen into her body at all. “I’m not — you’re still a...no matter how I feel, I shouldn’t have hit you. I’m sorry.” _You’re still an ass, I can’t believe —_

Bruce’s throat bobs, his eyes a million miles away. The tendons of his neck are dark and swelling fast, and the sight snuffs her anger out like a light, replacing with something else. _You hurt him enough that he’s having to fight like this. Your temper, your fault, your fault._ The air is heavier around them now as an ‘ _if_ ’ shifts to a ‘ _when_ ,’ and Darcy is suddenly very close to a thoroughly inappropriately timed cry.

“Do I need to call Tony? I — Let me get you down to your subfloor and I’ll leave you alone,” she continues thickly. “While we can, let me h-help you.”

“Get out. Now.”

Her knees give a threatening wobble. If she were a good friend, or at least a good person, she would protest. He needed to get down to his holding room before the Other Guy showed his face. Half of knowing Bruce was working to minimize the guilt that fueled his post-Hulk moping. He would regret not going down there after the fact, and he’d resent her for not making him. ( _And_ , a nagging pang in her gut reminds her, _for causing it in the first place_.)

But Darcy isn’t a good person, and not a good friend, and not a good anything else. She hardly looks at Bruce again before stumbling out of the door.

The first thunderous _crash_ rattles the building as she cranks her keys in her car’s ignition, and Darcy only thinks about getting out of the compound gates before the automatic lockdown traps her in.

* * *

They all have to work in Lab Two the next day, since Lab One is still quarantined from it’s space-goo exposure two weeks prior and the Hulk took it upon himself to redecorate most of Labs Three to Six the night before. Everyone is cramped and cranky, but Darcy’s black mood earns her a table to herself despite the crowd. No one wants to deal with her, and she doesn’t blame them.

Tony is unconcerned by or unaware of her imposed bubble of misery and solitude, because when he strolls in just before lunch, he walks up to her easily.

“Morning, Lewis.”

She manages a grunt in acknowledgement, not looking up from the receipts and purchase orders in front of her.

“Feeling alright?”

She jabs the numbers into her calculator with more force than really necessary. One of the interns must have fucked up somewhere, because the numbers aren’t adding up properly. She’s ready to murder them all just to be on the safe side and ensure it _never happens again_ when Tony leans forward, pulling the sleeve of her ratty t-shirt up to reveal the bruises on her skin there.

“Weird looking hickeys,” he offers mildly. When she jerks away, he lets the sleeve fall back into place, shoving his hands in his pockets. “We have a relaxed office, but this is pushing business casual. Is that a sleep shirt? You don’t look like you’ve slept, so it might not be.”

“You want another sexual harassment claim on your resume? Is that what you want? I can do that for you.”

Tony purses his lips. He’s got uneven stubble on his face and a rumpled suit jacket thrown over a stained wife beater, smeared in motor oil and god knows what else. He’s got no room to talk about how scrubby she looks.

“Has Bruce talked to you today?”

Darcy slams the paper back to the table top. She grabs for her purse and keys blindly, standing to leave.

“I quit.”

“You don’t. Sit down.”

She checks him with her shoulder as she leaves. “I fucking do, actually —”

Tony reaches for her arm, and Darcy jerks away so quickly that she nearly stumbles backwards onto a table littered with test tube samples.

“Don’t cause a scene, Pepper hates that.” He helps her get steadied on her feet and makes a show of stepping back from her personal space, hands raised. “Please, Lewis. Just a minute before you trek all the way to HR.”

Around them, the lab has gone still and quiet. Her skin prickles from all the eyes on them. “Fine,” she grinds out. “You can _escort me_ to HR.”

Tony walks her to the elevator at the end of the hall in silence. The doors make an unbearably soft _woosh_ as they close behind them.

“FRIDAY, a little privacy in here please.”

Darcy is going to fucking throttle him even before the lights dim in the elevator, and a soft, jazzy tune starts drifting down from the speakers.

Tony clears his throat pointedly. “Not that kind of privacy, thank you,” he grinds out. “Just lock the doors.”

The lights brighten and the music stops.

“Fucking _disgusting_ ,” Darcy snarls, stood as far away from him as possible.

“You wouldn’t be saying that if you were acting even halfway like yourself.” He scrubs his hands over his face. “I won’t accept your resignation, so you can suck it up. Foster and Selvig will complain if you leave over something stupid and I don’t want to hear it, they aren’t worth the trouble. Take me to HR for,” he waves his hand at her vaguely, “sexual whatever if you want, but I need to know where Bruce is first.”

Darcy gapes at him. “What do you mean _where is Bruce_? How did you — how the fuck did you manage to lose a Hulk?”

Tony glares at her, and for a moment looks so unlike himself that Darcy clamps her mouth shut.

“He’s not a _thing_ I can misplace,” Tony says testily.

“Oh, who the fuck are you telling?” Darcy snaps back, arms crossed. “I thought he was brooding in his apartment or something. He wouldn’t talk to me either way, so let me out of this fucking torture box.”

Hesitance looks funny on Tony’s face. His lips have gone a little white, and Darcy doesn’t even get to think about how dumb it looks. “Because of what he did to you last night, you mean.”

Darcy is very still. “What are you talking about?”

“...There are cameras in Bruce’s apartment. Extra — extra cameras to what we have in the other rooms,” Tony grimaces. “His idea. He insisted —”

“ _Have you been watching us_ —”

“I had to look after he trashed half the building last night, Lewis! I’m not — Pep would _skin me alive_ —”

“ _Is that all that’s stopping you_ ?” She shrieks. “FRIDAY, let me out _right now_ or I’m going to go into the _goddamn walls_ with wire cutters—”

“Could you quit being such a little shit for a minute?” Tony barks. Darcy has never seen him so visibly agitated. He takes a step forward to her only to lean back when she shoots him a venomous glare.

“I’m not going to touch you, Jesus. I’m not going to hurt you —”

“I know that,” Darcy growls, arms crossed over her chest. She doesn’t want to be touched anymore, is all. That doesn’t mean Tony has to treat her like a goddamn nuclear missile.

Tony doesn’t even acknowledge it. “Just — listen, I know you’re mad at Bruce but you aren’t this petty, I know you still want to help him.” He pauses here, scrubbing his sunglasses with the hem of his shirt. “Also I am your boss and I’m telling you to tell me.”

Darcy _is_ furious — at Bruce, at herself, at more things than she can count. But Tony has missed the point by such a wide margin she can only throw her hands in the air, at an utter loss. “Now I’m a _liar_ too? I hit him, Tony. That’s why the Other G— _he’s_ upset with _me_ and he has a reason to be. He won’t talk to me and I don’t blame him but you are wasting your time asking me about it. That’s the goddamn problem.”

Tony stares at her like she’s grown a second head, then a third. “Unbelievable. Unbe— you _deserve_ each other—”

Darcy whacks his side with her purse. Tony grabs her arm when she draws back for another swing, mouth turned down with a heavy frown.

“I saw how you got these.” His thumb sweeps under her sleeve, over the bruises on her bicep.

Darcy hasn’t really thought about them since Bruce let her go in the first place, so she misses whatever Tony is trying to imply with that. It’s just a bruise, after all, in the face of everything else.

He must read something into her silence. He looks carefully above her head with a pained grimace. “You aren’t….I know what I said, but. If you’re scared, or something, it’s _okay—_ ”

“I’m not scared of Bruce,” she says flatly.

Tony studies her a moment longer before releasing her arm. It’s all Darcy can do to not shake the touch off altogether.

“If you hear from him, will you just —”

“Sure,” Darcy huffs. Anything to get out of this fucking elevator. “Don’t hold your breath, but sure.”

“...Open up, FRIDAY.” The doors click open. “Take the rest of the day, Lewis. You’re making the new techs piss themselves. It’s unhygienic.”

She flips him the bird as she marches out into the hall, pretending it’s a dignified march and not her running away.

* * *

Bruce is off the grid for fifteen days. He comes back into the lab like nothing is out of the ordinary on day sixteen, save for having gone conveniently Darcy-blind. His gaze passes over her easily, never quite catching, not even when Darcy dresses down a lab tech or shatters a whole plate of samples while wrestling her arm back from inside of one of Jane’s _horror_ machines. They never share work tables or personal space, and they do not, ever, speak.

It’s fine. Darcy isn’t even trying to interact with him, really, is trying to give him the space to readjust to the land of the living before she tries apologizing again, but Bruce’s back will stiffen if she even glances his direction or speaks loud enough for him to hear. Sometimes he doesn’t make it to the lab at all. Sometimes he can’t make himself stay once he makes it down in the first place.

It’s fine. Darcy can make it fine. It’s her fault in the ways that matter, maybe, so she is fine with sucking up the consequences.

Really, it’s fine.

* * *

She makes it two weeks before cracking completely. It’s hardly even a conscious choice; Erik, jetlagged from his redeye back from Oslo, knocks her coffee off the table and ruins her blouse. Darcy has made it up to Bruce’s room, hand poised over the knob, before she’s even realized she’s done it.

“Fucking embarrassing,” she mutters, rubbing a hand over her face. For one reason or another, Darcy can’t make herself turn heel and leave.

It would be shitty, after how they’ve left things, to bother him now just for a spare shirt.

Really, really shitty.

Swallowing thickly, Darcy knocks on the door.

It’s not possible to tell, really, but Darcy could swear the steps she hears behind the door _feel_ hesitant.

“...Since when do you knock?”

Darcy clears her throat, unable to look up from his feet despite her determination to darken his door. He’s wearing a pair of socks that Darcy got him as a joke for National Science Day, pink and littered with sickly sweet looking bunny rabbits, and her chest clenches in on itself.

“Do you. Uh. Can I borrow a shirt? Did I ever, I mean. If I have any left here, from before. I don’t expect you to give me one of yours, or anything.”

It’s quiet for long enough that Darcy dares to look up. His hair is longer than she’s ever seen him wear it, and his shirt is old and loose enough at the neck to show where his collarbone sweeps up to his shoulder.

“I don’t understand your face right now,” Darcy huffs. She doesn’t feel like she’s _going_ to cry, but maybe like she _could_ , if she really let herself try.

“Understand my face?” Bruce echoes, mystified. He hasn’t moved an inch.

“This was a mistake,” Darcy says softly, mostly to herself and unable to look at him any longer. “I’m sorry for bothering — interrupting you. I’ll go grab an extra lab coat or something.”

“Don’t be stupid.” Bruce grunts, moving back to allow her inside. “Please,” he tacks on unhelpfully after a long, tense pause.

Darcy doesn’t know what else to do but follow, standing awkwardly in his kitchen as Bruce audibly rummages around in his bedroom for a shirt. Dimly, she thinks this is the best chance she’s going to get to apologize without prying eyes looking on, and when Bruce returns she’s hardly got the thing in her hands before blurting it out.

“I’m so. I’m so sorry, Bruce. I know you don’t need to, like...I don’t expect you to forgive me, but I wanted to say it again, when we were both out of the — out of the moment, or whatever.”

She tries to pull the shirt out of his hands, but he holds onto it.

“You...are trying to apologize to me?”

Darcy can hardly hear him even though it’s silent in his apartment, not even the hum of an A/C unit droning on to cut through the dead air.

“For hitting you.” Maybe he wants her to say it? “For...for making you have to, uh. Making you deal with the Other Guy. For bringing him out.”

“For —” Bruce slumps down into the kitchen chair behind him, head in his hands. His shoulders are shaking, but Darcy can’t tell if that’s the usual Hulk tremor or something else.

“Are you alright? Should I go? Is that what this is?”

Bruce rucks a hand through his hair, waving at the seat across from him at the table. “You don’t need to apologize to me for that.”

“I really do. I fucked up, there’s never a reason to try and hurt someone like that. No matter what I meant, I can’t imagine how much it hurts to... And then I hit. I hit you. I’m sorry.”

Bruce stares at her blankly. “I nearly killed you that night, and you think I am upset with you for slapping me.”

“Don’t start this again, Bruce, I’ve told you that I’m not scared of the Other Guy and I’m not scared of you —”

“Not the Hulk. I — _I_ grabbed you, I pushed you, I nearly choked you because I couldn’t control myself.” Bruce leans across the table and reaches for her arm before stopping himself, pulling away to sit back in his chair. “Are you alright?” He asks stiffly.

“Ob—obviously? I won’t say you weren’t acting like an ass that night, but you’re making it bigger than it was on, uh. Your part. I should be used to you being an ass by now, is what I mean.”

Bruce is silent for a long minute, not looking at her, before he rises and begins to make some coffee. From the corner of her eye, she sees him pull two mugs from his cabinet and wills herself to stay quiet, just for now, and to wait.

While he’s busy, she peels her shirt off and pulls the new one on. It’s not one of hers, but Darcy can’t trust herself to focus on that right now.

“You can put that in the hamper,” Bruce offers carefully, stirring creamer into one of the cups. _It’s only coffee_ , she reminds herself, walking through his apartment on autopilot. _This doesn’t mean anything. This is basic politeness._

She returns to the kitchen to see Bruce still propped against the counter, one mug in his hands, the other steaming near his hip. Darcy takes it carefully, wary of leaning too far into his space and scaring him off again.

“When I said...” Bruce clears his throat, takes a sip of coffee. He begins again after a long pause. “When I said you were trying to kill yourself, I wasn’t threatening you on purpose. I wasn’t saying that _I_ was going to try to...”

“Who are you trying to convince, here?” She shrugs, pointedly light. “I told you then I wasn’t scared of you.” _Mostly, anyway, I wasn’t. Not like that. Before, anyway. Now, I —_

“You don’t have to be brave for me, Darcy. I saw — when I grabbed you. You were scared. I’m sorry. It’s unforgivable. You were right to react however you wanted, after I put you in that position.”

Darcy sips her coffee, unable to give him an honest answer for that one. _So what if I’m a little scared? What does that matter? Maybe being scared is worth it. Maybe that’s a trade I can live with. Maybe I want to live with it._

“Brave for you, huh?”

“Yes. I’m sorry.”

She frowns. It feels like Bruce is apologizing for more than one thing, and Darcy isn’t sure she can accept that if it’s the case.

“I promised I wouldn’t ever do that,” Bruce continues after a minute. The words are foreign and unsure; Darcy hasn’t ever heard him speak with any uncertainty in his voice before. How much did she really know the man at all?

“I don’t know if this matters to you now, Bruce, but I was upset with you for being an obtuse asshole. Because you weren’t listening to me, and you put words in my mouth when you knew I didn’t mean them. You surprised me when you grabbed me, but I didn’t think. I still don’t think you’d ever hurt me, or whatever.” _Not when you could help it, which is most times. I can live with most times._

“But I did. Tony said you had bruises.”

Darcy bites the inside of her cheek. She could have also gotten a bruise from running into a desk in the lab, or from tripping on the hardwoods in his apartment in her sock feet. It’s just a little smudge, a few burst blood vessels in a sea of thousands, and it’s not permanent. Just a stain that washes away as quick as it comes. She has more than one actual scar from Bruce’s purposeful hands that she loves — thought they both _liked_ , at least. The two aren’t the same, but it’s not so different, either.

Bruce catches her absently rubbing at one of them, a neat line under her collarbone an inch or two long. His expression shutters up immediately, and Darcy wants to kick herself.

“It was an accident, Bruce. I don’t m — I _like_ when you touch me.” Her face is on fire, like she is twelve years old again and still trying to work out how _boys_ work. “I only wish you did it _more_.”

“You’re remembering it differently than how it happened because you want a certain outcome today. I meant what I said before, this was a dumb thing for us to try. I won’t risk hurting you any more than I have.”

“Maybe you hurt me by talking to me like I’m a kid who can’t take care of herself. Maybe it _hurts me_ watching you try to — to isolate yourself, or punish yourself, or whatever you want to call it.”

“Maybe I’m only trying to choose the more manageable hurt between the shitty options we have available.” He’s smiling a little behind his coffee cup when he takes a sip, here, but there’s little real humor in it.

This is, maybe, the most frank and honest discussion they have ever had. _That’s_ an unbearable hurt, really.

She looks up at the ceiling before trying to level with him. “What if we tried, maybe, being reasonable human beings for once.”

Bruce sighs. “Darcy, I —”

“Sometimes your ideas are weird, but I don’t...I wouldn’t let you so something I hated. Why can’t you trust me to at least tell you that? Do you really think I’m dumb?”

“You know I don’t.”

“Okay, so maybe. Maybe act like it, then?” Bruce snorts at her, but she ploughs on. “Because if you’re worried about that... _stuff_ , we don’t have to do it. We can find something else to keep us busy. I mean, I mostly liked it and I thought _you_ liked it, as the. Uh. Do-er. But if it’s terrible to you, we can try something different. Different like...talking to each other, maybe. Maybe we start there.” She drums her nails against the mug, unable to look up to his face just yet. “Unless that’s terrible, too.”

The thing is this: Bruce has become something singular to Darcy, abstract and exact and home in a category he shares with no one and nothing else. Bruce is _Bruce_ , and she forgets, sometimes, that he exists outside of what she makes of him, that maybe she won’t ever know him as well as she wants to. Across from her now he looks older than she remembers, almost foreign, but maybe she’s not been looking close enough to begin with to really say.

“It wasn’t terrible to me, Darce. It wasn’t.”

Before she can stop herself, she reaches out to run her thumb along one of the lines bracketing his mouth. In their routine, he should be leaning away now, not allowing her to touch him like this, unplanned and without permission. His stubble prickles her knuckles, and she watches his eyes close briefly before her hand falls away from his face.

“You look tired.”

“So do you,” he shrugs, finishing off the rest of his drink.

“You know what a lady likes to hear.”

Darcy takes her time polishing her coffee off. Bruce just waits, studying her like he intends to memorize the curve of her fingers and the movement of her hands grabbing for his cup and washing it in his sink, offering nothing else for a long, long few minutes.

“You have some other — some other things in my room.”

Darcy doesn’t even try to fight her stomach sinking down to the floor. She had thought, maybe, him humoring her meant they might try again. All the more fool her, for thinking she could change Bruce’s mind about anything. She follows him dumbly back to his bedroom, perched on the corner of his bed while he shuffles through his dresser. Darcy reminds herself that she loves the stubborn parts of Bruce as much as the ones that give into her just because she asked nicely.

Suddenly, Bruce goes still.

“I know you meant all that, by the way.”

Zoned out as she is, it takes her a minute to thread his words together with their meaning. “Uh, obviously I meant it? You know I’m not a liar.” She tries very hard to make that last bit not come out as pouting.

Bruce’s expression is something nearly tender when he turns around, a few folded shirts in his hands. When he places them in Darcy’s lap, he presses a firm, brief kiss to her temple. Very friendly. Ultra platonic. Darcy’s whole chest seizes up, and she has to hold the shirts up to her chest in a vise to avoid doing something stupid with her hands instead.

“I do know. You should probably leave soon.”

It’s as gracious a boot as she could have hoped to get. She leaves easily enough, and that night when she realizes the shirts he gave her are all his, she smooshes her face in them and can’t help but smile, a little.

* * *

They stop the weird shit cold turkey. They speak in the lab without making the others uncomfortable and Bruce stops looking like a kicked dog whenever Darcy is in his orbit for more than five minutes. Eventually, she forgets the cold clench of fear that would sometimes bloom in her chest when the lab was close to empty around them or the light hit his face funny. He walks her to her car, once, when she has to stay late rearranging flights for Erik and Tony to Hong Kong, and his Smile Count is in the double digits, at least. It’s like they are really, actually friends.

It’s good. It also sucks.

“Hey, remember that Lebanese place you ordered out from that one time?”

Bruce looks up from his laptop, a crease in his brow. He’s taken to secluding himself in Lab Four under the guise of overseeing reconstruction despite repairs being completed two and a half weeks prior, and Darcy invents reasons throughout the day to pop in on him. Sometimes she doesn’t bother with the reasons at all, if it’s a slow day or Tony is grating on their nerves. It’s the best place to broach this, considering. Private, neutral ground.

“I do. What about it?”

“I was thinking maybe we could, uh. Do that again.”

She hears Bruce’s _I don’t think that’s a good idea_ before he even says it, and she’s quick to try her hand at negotiating.

“Not the sex part, or whatever. I know you don’t want that. But the. You know. The eating part. Eating together part. Together part.”

“Not the ‘sex part,’” Bruce snorts. “Did we ever really get to the ‘sex part’?”

It would have been a joke, before. But it presses a yellow-tender bruise now, _after._

_That hurts_ , Darcy frowns. _Maybe that will keep hurting. Maybe that’s just a hurt we have to live through._

“If you don’t want to hang out you can just say so.” Darcy has worked too hard to let herself snap at him now. _After_ , she tells herself. When they are back someplace solid and honest, Bruce would be overdue for a full reaming. They will have both earned it. It’s worth biting her tongue for now, worth giving him passes where he doesn’t deserve them. Darcy loves Bruce, even if it’s different than before, maybe even a little harder, and maybe this new love is more a verb than a noun. Maybe this one is different because it waits, and decides, and thinks, and wants, and plans, and fights, each choice weighed against itself: _is this something I am doing because I love you? I don’t want to make choices that aren’t made out of loving you._

He adjusts his glasses. “I know. And still, I didn’t.” Bruce pushes back from the table a little, carefully not looking at her. “Your place is — better. We should do it there. If you’re comfortable with it. If you really want to.”

“You expect me to come up with the ideas _and_ play Holly Hostess?” Darcy groans, but she’s smiling and comfortable perched on the corner of the desk when she says it.

* * *

It’s fine. They eat dinner like they are friends and Bruce lets Darcy hug him at the end of the night, though he doesn’t really return it with more than just a tight smile.

It’s fine, really, until Bruce looks up at her over breakfast almost three weeks later and winces.

“Something wrong with the food?” Darcy asks, mouth full. She scared the lingering lab techs out of the little fourth floor kitchenette as she brought the steaming McDonald’s bags in, and away from the extra bodies is free to study Bruce as openly as she wants to. His grimace on the first sip of coffee, like he’s wary she hasn’t learned how to make it for him yet. The specific shades of grey in his hair backlit from the sun rising through the window to their left. His rough hands, one around a fork that is midway through smearing grape jelly on a smooshed biscuit, the other twitching on the bartop.

Bruce clears his throat. “No.”

Darcy leans in anyway as if to examine his breakfast, and if it’s really just a guise to get a whiff of his aftershave, that’s frankly between her and God.

She looks up, trying to parse through the specific furrow between his brows in her expanding “Bruce’s Facial Expression Encyclopedia.” “Then what’s the problem?”

Slowly, Bruce brings his fork up, pressing the tines into her cheek. Darcy doesn’t hardly dare to breathe.

“You’re making this hard for me, and I can’t tell if you’re doing it on purpose or not.”

Bruce isn’t touching her anywhere, but Darcy is all at once warm all over like his hands are roaming free over her.

Darcy swallows a think lump in her throat. “I would _never_ ,” she begins gravely, “make your life harder. I’m offended you think I would ever even attempt to rabblerouse or elsewise cause mischief.”

The tines of the fork dig in a little harder. “If I could, you know. If I could, I would —”

“I think I’ll take what you can give me, if it’s all the same to you,” she grins cheekily. This feels like movement, this feels like a door opening, this feels like _maybe_.

“Sometimes it’s not.” Bruce lowers the fork. “Sometimes it’s really not.”

Darcy watches Bruce raise his hand to cup her cheek, hardly daring to believe her luck. His overwarm palm is shaking more than normal, and he’s only touching her _barely_ but still it’s more than enough. She could make this enough, for now, if she decides to. Darcy hums, pleased, and tries to stay as still as possible to keep his hand there longer. When his grip changes to bite into her cheek, his thumb tugging her bottom lip down, Darcy fancies reading the subtext to it:

_I touch you like this because I can’t trust myself to be tender with you. You’re worth enough to me I can’t risk being gentle when I hold you._

She scoots a little closer on her stool. They aren’t touching, but they could be, and that’s where Darcy would like them to stay, at least while they can. In the realm of Bruce’s possibilities, when Bruce is ready to be a little brave.

While she’s at it, she imagines something else in the touch as his hand falls away, because she’s not good at stopping while she’s ahead:

_Is this okay? Is this what you want? Am I?_

Maybe it’s not a question Bruce is ready to ask or wants answered in the first place, but Darcy has always been a giver. She headbutts the hollow of his shoulder as lightly as she dares en route to grabbing the top half of his biscuit and popping it in her mouth.

“I’m trying to keep you alive,” Bruce says several minutes later, apropos of nothing. His arm is slung over the back of her chair, though she’s leaned forward enough it’s not touching her because she knows he wouldn’t like it.

“I respect that,” Darcy nods. She does, mostly, now. Now, _after_ . _And I’m trying to keep you_ , _once I catch you,_ she muses, but she manages to catch the words behind her teeth. It’s for the best.

* * *

“So. Okay. So...officially speaking, I would like to put in a request. Through the appropriate, official channels I mean.”

Bruce hums around a mouthful of noodles. He manages it somehow mid-slurp, which shouldn’t make her feel as goddamned _fond_ as it does.

“This is my notarized request to, uh. Try again.”

Bruce swallows, and though his tone is perfectly light, he won’t quite meet her gaze across his kitchen table. “What do you mean?”

Darcy rocks back on the two hind legs of her chair, just to see him cut his eyes at her in warning. She lowers back down to all fours. “Doing...whatever it is we used to do. Being together, not just as. Not just friends.” She can’t help but fidget, drawing nonsense into the condensation of the glass in front of her. “Maybe honestly, this time. Both of us being honest. And trying again.”

“‘Whatever it is we used to do,’” He echoes. Bruce rubs at his forehead, both elbows planted on the table.

“Yeah, whatever you called...I mean I know I wasn’t — like I didn’t think you wanted me to call myself your girlfriend, or whatever. But I’ve been...since then, I thought maybe that _is_ something that I want, now. And, uh. Going forward. To name it something solid. I think that would be better. If you want to try, too.”

He doesn’t speak for a very long minute, but Darcy forces herself to bite her fingers into her legs under the table and wait. Darcy said she wanted to try, and trying looks like this and feels like this, sometimes, too.

“Because you are in love with me, still. Like you told me after Israel.”

“I— oh. Uhm. Well.”

Darcy wants to die, a little. That’s not her most compelling argument, and judging by how Bruce’s face goes as blank and white as a sheet, he agrees. But Bruce had enforced something of a gag rule on her feelings after she confessed them. He never mentioned it and hated when she would: even in a sideways reference, much less to pull them out all at once like a blunt force weapon. For all she knew, Bruce was choosing to forget about or brush them off entirely, either because he thought she wasn’t sincere or because he didn’t return the sentiment.

It was fine, because loving someone isn’t a reactionary action, and despite constant appearances, her self-esteem wasn’t totally in the tubes. Darcy loves Bruce as a conscious decision that she makes and chooses to keep making, and it doesn’t require any input or influence from his own feelings or actions. It’s hers. She owns it, and it’s something she refuses to give up or share. But out of the blue like this —

She clears her throat. Trying looks like this and feels like this, and she wants him honestly, because they deserve that.

“I do. I am.” Little spots of black pepper her vision, and she forces herself to take a deep breath, then another, then another. “I want it because I love you. I want — I want you, properly, because I love you. Still, I— yes. I want you where we call it the same thing.”

Bruce pushes his pad thai back, rising to his feet. He leans against the counter with his back to her.

“You were trying to scare me off with that,” Darcy realizes, frowning. “You thought you could fling it back at me, that I love you. Did you think I’d be embarrassed, or something?”

“ _Aren’t_ you?” Bruce looks at her over his shoulder like he has never seen her before. His shoulders tremble, and the watch on his thick wrist throws a little light haphazardly across the room in time with his shakes.

“N-no? Why would I be?” Darcy clamps her mouth shut, fighting down a groan. That was perhaps the worst thing she could have said —

She pushes up from her chair, not hearing a single word Bruce is saying, and steps as close as she thinks she can get away with. When her forehead touches his back, he goes still as marble, and just as quiet.

“I literally don’t know what else I need to do to show you that it doesn’t matter to me about the Other Guy, or that you’re older than me, or that we work together, or that you think it’s dangerous because you play superhero sometimes and I’m as— as life-proof as you.”

Bruce scoffs. “I wasn’t going to bring my age into it at all, thank you very much. I’m not _that_ old.”

Darcy rolls her eyes. “No, really, thank _you_.” Slowly, she wraps her arms around his middle. When he doesn’t shake her off, she relaxes into the stiff line of his back with a sigh.

“I’m still alive,” she points out helpfully. She doesn’t squeeze him for emphasis, but she _wants_ to, wants it enough that she hopes he feels it anyway. Bruce doesn’t answer her, studying the cabinet in front of him with a near ruthless intensity.

Darcy wants them. Darcy wants this. She loves Bruce, and all the choices she makes after that one are easy in comparison. So she adjusts her grip and tries again, leading by example.

Turning her head, she presses her lips between his shoulder blades, breathing in the clean smell of his shirt. “Still here, and I love you.”

“Darcy —”

One of her hands snakes up to rest over one of his own. Some of their fingers slot together, but some of them don’t. It’s good. She likes it.

“We lived through that, too.” The noise is all muffled into his back, but Darcy thinks it’s probably fine. “The hand-holding incident of 2018. I loved you all the way through it.”

His other hand covers hers so briefly that Darcy thinks maybe she just imagined it. But she didn’t. He is trying, and his hand was there, and that’s enough to earn a reward. She presses another kiss through his shirt as he clears his throat.

“Okay.”

“Thank you.”

“You have to — you need to back off, right now, though.”

It’s hard, but Darcy wants to try, so she drops her arms and steps away from the soft, trembling heat of his body, then takes another, just to be sure.

He’s slow to turn around, and there’s something skeptical in the twist of his mouth, but he does it.

“We’ll try,” he says carefully. “I can’t — promise you anything else. It doesn’t matter what we want. I’m going to keep you alive even if you’re mad about it.”

Darcy scoffs. “We can promise that together, thanks. Being with you isn’t a suicide mission. Despite what you think I’m trying to stick it out on this bitch of an earth a while longer.”

Patience has always been hard for Darcy with things that matter, but she digs her nails into her palms and waits for Bruce to make the next choice.

Finally, Bruce looks away from her face, pushing off from the counter. “Okay,” he says again. “We’ll try.”

She shoos his hands away when they start to clear up from their dinner, and he settles for watching her as she scrubs the dishes in his sink. After, he dries her hands himself with paper towels, and it feels better than a kiss probably could, better than his _okay_ had felt, better even than how she remembers his hands feeling when they pulled her underwear down to her knees, then trailed up to touch her.

“Are you gonna ask me to leave now?”

Bruce closes his eyes, breathing in long and slow through his nose, then out through his mouth, measured and careful.

“Yes.”

“Okay.” Darcy looks down at her feet and reminds herself that the worst thing he could tell her is ‘no,’ and she’s lived through that before. She looks back up with her best smile and a wink. “Can I kiss you goodnight?”

He rolls his eyes with a groan. His hand hovers at the small of her back as he walks her to his door.

“It’s not a good idea,” he says finally, holding the door open. But he presses his mouth to the crown of her head as she ducks out, anyway.

* * *

“Gotta thought.”

The bag of popcorn balanced precariously on Darcy’s stomach gives a threatening wobble as she jiggles her foot nervously. She’s sprawled on her back, her neck held aloft awkwardly with pillows so she can watch her tiny little TV, utterly unrelaxed.

Her phone vibrates with an incoming text. She swipes it open so eagerly the phone nearly flies out of her hand altogether.

“Is that a question or a statement?”

Darcy rolls her eyes.

“We are not sharing the same physical space rn,” she types out carefully. It gets a read receipt almost instantly, and she bites her cheek even if no one is around to see her smile. “So,” she continues, “I thought maybe we could try something, no risk.”

The grey dots appear, disappear, and reappear several times on her phone screen.

“Don’t hurt yourself there, Bruce.”

“What do you mean by try something?”

Darcy pauses the show on the television and sits up, moving the popcorn to her side. Her stomach is a knot that she doesn’t even bother trying to untangle, just yet.

“Well,” she types out slowly. “Ok. Well. If the Other Guy were out of the picture and I was there with you, what would we be doing?”

Immediately after pressing send, Darcy rolls over and screams a little into her pillows. She didn’t initiate this _usually_ , but she definitely _had done it_ before, and none of those times felt so utterly _mortifying._

“I am surely too old for whatever it is you’re trying to initiate.” There’s barely a pause before another text comes. “Isn’t this worth a phone call, at least?”

Darcy doesn’t even get a chance to reply to that before his call lights up her screen. Feeling no little bit like she’s getting called to the principal’s office, Darcy puts the phone up to her ear with just a little grimace before trying for bravado:

“Get with the times, pops. This is how we do it now.”

“ _Pops_?” Bruce sputters.

“You want me to call you ‘Daddy’ instead?”

“ _Darcy_.”

She munches a handful of popcorn nervously.

“Are you eating?” Bruce sounds so incredulous Darcy has to double check that she is, in fact, eating.

“Uh, yeah? That a problem? What are you doing?”

There is a long silence on the other end of the line, but Darcy is getting used to waiting. She hears a rustle, then a door closing, then a few long deep breaths before Bruce speaks again.

“You weren’t even planning on giving me your full attention? That’s pretty ballsy. And rude.”

No one is there to see it, so Darcy quickly spits the half chewed popcorn back in the bag and all but slam dunks it into the trash can in her bathroom. By the time she makes it back to the bed, she’s audibly out of breath.

“You alright over there?” He asks dryly.

“Dandy. Great. The — something real riveting is on the TV now. I’m, uh. Enraptured by it.”

“Well, don’t let me interrupt you —”

“Please, Bruce.”

It’s quiet.

“Without the Other Guy, huh?” Bruce _hm_ s low in the back of his throat, and Darcy wants to curl up in the sound of it even from the other end of the phone.

“Without the Other Guy. Whatever you want.”

“I’d stop sending you home every night,” Bruce begins slowly, his voice very soft. It sounds like he’s going to continue, but he doesn’t.

Darcy breathes out slowly. “I’d like that.” A pause. “Would you — would you touch me?”

“You know I would.”

It’s quiet. Something has settled in Darcy’s throat that keeps the words down, for once.

“...Don’t you? You do know that.”

“Sure,” she says quickly, clearing her throat. _Decidedly_ unsexy. “Yeah. Why wouldn’t you?”

This is perhaps the biggest _whump_ of her life. She regrets calling, though she doesn’t really know what she expected, if she’s being honest.

“I’ve just finished up here with Erik,” Bruce says carefully after a moment. “Do you think I can come over?”

* * *

Darcy has some dignity left still, and she doesn’t rush to clean her apartment or even herself before Bruce comes over. Her bed is unmade, and there’s maybe a popcorn kernel stuck in her rat’s nest hair, but it’s fine. Her pajamas aren’t her most embarrassing, and really, Bruce has seen her much worse.

It doesn’t matter anyway, of course, because when Bruce shows up at her door he’s utterly shitfaced, wobbly on his feet and hardly able to keep his eyes open.

“Jesus — Jesus _Christ_ , Bruce! Did you drive here like this? What the hell is the matter with you?”

He allows her steadying hands to guide him to her couch where she lays him flat, slurring so badly it takes a few attempts to parse any coherency through it at all. “No, jus’ took ‘m when I...when I got here.”

Before Darcy can even ask what he took, he grabs her by the waist and pulls her down, heavy and awkward. She winds up laid half on his lap, one foot holding most of her weight on the floor, and no small part of her topknot in Bruce’s mouth.

His hands rub silted, loose lines over her hips and up to her ribs. Close like this, Darcy sees he’s not shaking at all.

“Bruce, what the fuck?”

A few long, deep breaths are her answer. It’s — tempting, really, to get distracted. Bruce has never felt so relaxed, and when he casually reaches down, grabbing some approximation of her thigh and ass to hoist her other leg up so she’s fully laid on top of him, her brain short circuits with a crackling _pop_ she swears she can hear.

“Drugs,” he sighs dreamily a few moments later. “ _Drugs._ Make it quiet. No Other Guy, r’now. Jus’ like you asked.”

“Like I — _oh_.”

“Said you wanna _try_.” The last word stretches out, taffylike, on a sigh. Bruce unwinds her hair from its bun and runs his fingers through it, tipping her head back with gentle pulls that make her toes curl.

“Your poor liver,” she breathes, but only part of her means it.

“Wears off fast. Dumb — dumb body stuff.”

Darcy swallows, wants to say: _this is enough, this is more than enough, don’t do this again, you didn’t have to try like this_ , but she can’t make the words come out.

Wriggling her arms free for leverage, she pushes herself up and studies him close. He grins at her dopey eyed and loose, and all the heavy things she holds tucked close inside her chest give threatening creaks as she leans down and slots their mouths together, like they could escape if she’s not careful. Maybe they really could. Maybe they even should.

Bruce only attempts half-hearted participation, and that’s all the better as far as Darcy is concerned. This is less about real kissing and more about providing some structural support she can build her daydreams around _after_ , when the drugs are gone and Bruce is no longer pliant underneath her. It’s what she wants to give Bruce, too, if he can remember any of this later. Bruce chose her like this, and Darcy is choosing to give it to him.

She gives his hips an experimental squeeze with her thighs, rewarded by a rumbling deep in his chest that lights her up inside out, and really while she has him down there it wouldn’t be fair to _not_ roll her hips into his.

“You won’t let me tell you this sober,” she pants, trailing little kisses down from his mouth to his jaw and delighting in the sharp, pinprick drag of his stubble against her lips, “but I want you like this all the time. Not to be weird, but like almost literally all of the time.”

It’s _a lot_ to say out loud even if he’s high as a kite and may not remember, but it’s also still not enough to wrap around the whole of it, as it is, and also all that she wants them to have. Darcy’s heart is in her throat as she sucks a bruise to surface at Bruce’s neck and wiggles her hand down to ease his sweats down, each second expecting this to go tits up and ruin their shot.

But it doesn’t. Darcy keeps murmuring all the things she wants into Bruce’s neck and jaw as her hand finds him. She groans into his collarbone, suddenly imagining all the ways he would feel between her legs, half-formed thoughts and pictures that have her grip tightening.

Bruce hums, pulling away from her attention on his throat to hold her face in both hands. Darcy waits for him to move, but he doesn’t. His fingers are barely threaded through the hair at her temples, one thumb absently sweeping the paperthin skin under her eye.

_Oh,_ Darcy thinks. _Oh._ She lets her eyes flutter closed. Trying looks like this, too: a tender gesture made honestly and without preamble or a bookending disaster that follows. An allowed gentleness, something soft stretched to its fullest potential. Bruce chooses this, in the moment where he could have anything, and Darcy allows it.

Darcy brings her hands up to cover his, then lets them slip down his wrists, his forearms. He shivers underneath her when her thumbs sweep inside the crooks of his elbows, and Darcy swallows nervously. She wants to take her time. She wants to rush everything at once so that when he’s sober she can at least say they tried as much as they could when they had the chance. Darcy wants, she wants, she _wants_ so much it’s enough to keep her from ever really having it, even offered up to her as easy and pliant as this.

She peels his hands away from her face, tracing the little mountains and valleys of his knuckles before kissing the center of his palm, barely nibbling the little rise of blue pulse at his wrist.

The drugs should be wearing off soon, Bruce said it was fast. But he is boneless and unfocused under her for now, staying and trying and choosing Darcy each second longer that he lays there. Darcy drops his hands and slides her own up under the hem of his shirt, wiggling down from his waist to his thighs to give herself more room.

“Getting sober,” Bruce murmurs. His voice is hoarse and tired, no longer dreamy. “Careful.”

Darcy has no such plans to be, really, not until he makes her. She rakes her nails back down over his chest and stomach before leaning forward again, fingers knotting in his hair. She grinds her hips forward as she takes his bottom lip between her teeth, and the drugs might be wearing off but Bruce is still high enough to groan underneath her, his hips rocking upward as his hands grip her waist, clumsy and the right-wrong side of too tight.

Briefly, too briefly, she feels his hardness perfectly flush up against her. “How much longer —?” If she is fast, she could pull her sweats down, maybe. Maybe if she was fast enough she could slip him inside of her, just for a minute, just to feel —

Bruce grabs a fistfull of her hair. “Don’t,” he pants. “I’m sorry. Don’t.”

Darcy shoves down the disappointment, refusing to dwell on it now. “Okay. Okay. Can we — can we stay like this? Is this okay?”

He snakes his arms around to pull her flush to his front, her face buried in his neck. If she breathes very gently, she can feel his tremors grow faster, harder, his breathing more careful. Darcy nuzzles her nose into the sweet little hollow behind his ear, hands fisted in his shirt. His own fingers are biting into her hip and thigh enough to bruise.

“You should get up now.”

“Okay. I don’t— just so you know, since we are being honest now, I don’t want to. But I will.”

Bruce is smiling, a little, before his expression tilts to something pained. He pinches between his brow as she peels herself off of him and stands next to her couch.

“Shot in the dark here, but did you give yourself a hangover?”

“Maybe,” he grunts. “‘S been a while.” His eye cracks open a sliver. “Worth it.”

It’s probably a statement but has maybe a lilt towards the end that makes Darcy think it’s a question, too. She sinks down to her knees, her chin propped up on the couch near his middle.

“I could use a cigarette, if that’s what you’re asking.”

Snorting, he puts a heavy hand on top of her head, and it’s nice to just sit there with it for a minute and come back down before he speaks again. “Water.”

“Aspirin?” Darcy asks, halfway through pouring him a glass from the sink.

“No good. Dumb body stuff.”

“We’re used to that by now, though.”

Darcy gets him three more glasses of water in silence and when he starts to snore on her couch she yanks the duvet off her bed and flings it over him. She perches on the floor and wiggles his hand down so she can hold it while she finishes her show. He’s awake again soon enough; Darcy can tell when his breathing picks up and the rhythm of his tremors change, but he lays flat and stays wordless and pretends, letting Darcy keep his hand sandwiched between hers until the season finale.

* * *

“What do you like?”

They’ve been quiet for so long that the sun is already sinking to orange outside, and it takes her a few moments to connect any meaning to the noise of him speaking at all. Darcy hums, cocking her head to the side as her fingers drum against her Kindle’s screen.

“That’s a big question.”

She’s laying with her head at the foot of Bruce’s bed, watching him make notes in a spiral bound journal at the head, propped up with pillows. His reading glasses catch a glare from the window next to them, and the sight makes something warm and liquid ripple a bit in Darcy’s belly. She pokes at his ribs with her foot, light as she dares. This is the first time they’ve been in Bruce’s apartment post Drunken Stupor Incident, and Darcy feels the need to be extra careful with the ways she handles him.

“Strawberry ice cream,” she says after a minute, thoughtful. “And strawberry ice cream, only. Nothing else is valid. Poirot novels. Extra syrup in my coffee, but only the chocolate kind. Too much caramel tastes like pennies or hot dog water or something. Um, the color green—”

He grabs her foot, giving it a little squeeze.

“I meant,” he clears his throat. “I never just asked you, before, what you liked.” He releases her foot, hesitating as he sits up from the pillows.

Darcy blinks up at him, uncomprehending.

He pinches the bridge of his nose. “I thought it would be easier, if I didn’t know. I couldn’t — wouldn’t have to imagine them. Not being able to do them with you. To you.” He pauses, looking down at her with a little frown twisting his mouth. “Am I being clear enough here? I know I need to explain things to you a few times, usually.”

She sits up. “Oh.”

“If you want to tell me. If you don’t —”

Darcy grabs one of his hands, no longer affronted that he instinctively jerks away before allowing it. She slots their fingers together. “I like the weird shit. I’m not sure why, still, but I like it. Whenever you wanna, uh, pick that back up.” She swallows. “And I like...I would like it, I mean, if you could touch me more. Even like this,” she squeezes his hand. “I had a dream about riding your face the other night, though, if that’s more along the lines of what you’re asking.”

“I’m asking about all of it.”

Slowly, so he can see her intent, she leans forward to press her forehead to his shoulder. “A hug, sometimes?”

“I’ll work on it.”

“What about — would you like to watch me, maybe? Would that be okay? I, uh. Think about that one...a lot.”

“If you’ll let me.” His other hand comes to rest on her lower back. “What else?”

Bruce traces nonsense on the skin between her shirt and her sweats before sweeping up the line of her spine. His palm is heavy squeezing the nape of her neck. He lets her hold his hand close to her chest and rest her forehead on the hollow of his shoulder. He is trying. He's choosing. 

“I love you.”

It’s quiet. He doesn't move away. He's choosing. Maybe they are choosing the same thing, now. 

Darcy turns so she can look up at his face. “While we’re talking about things I like.”

"I see."

"And things you can think on in your free time. You can ponder over it all you want."

They have to get up eventually, of course. But the room keeps getting darker and a little cooler around them, and neither of them are ready to move _yet_. "Suppose I will," he says finally. It's enough.

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading :)
> 
> I'm working my way out of a writing slump. This was originally something short I planned for Kinktober that was supposed to be just...filth. But then this happened. I'm trying to remember how to write less self consciously, so this isn't super-edited and also, you know. Self-indulgent and over the top in regards to commas, em dashes, italics, metaphors, you name it -- all the shit I usually try to cut out ;p
> 
> Anyway! Big Shot Courage won't be finished until 2019. Sorry for the delay, but thanks to everyone being patient with me. :) Feedback is always appreciated!


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